Part filter, part distortion, part delay, many flavours of noise and lots of ways to destroy. Analogue mixer, analogue filter, analogue distortion, digital delay (for the crash factor)..... The video is a bit of a long runner and i made the mistake of lots of hands getting in the way moments, having not made one for a while. But it's worth checking out most of it if you like the idea of one of these. They're pretty good fx units with quite a unique character of their own. Capable of some pretty unhinged audio damage. In a way a bit like a sherman filterbank although obviously not as large or as intricate. It's not quite sure what it is but whatever it is it does it well. The chimaera has a two input mixer fed to a high pass / low pass filter which is then fed through a variable distortion circuit and into a digital delay to a single output. A selection of things end up going on here. People are often looking for a good distortion for a TB-303. I'd say this is one. In fact i'd say this is perfect for that kind of thing. If you've ever enjoyed using rebirth and the trippy / over driven sound you'd easily get out of that then this comes pretty close. Another demo of some drums, similar to the prototype demo i uploaded months ago. The lfo to the filter and delay has since been improved as has the distortion. Lots of little tweaks. With those revisions finished the pcb for this was finalised and i'm happy with it now. There's then a demo of it on it's own just using the filter resonance as a sound source going to the dark side with the delay crash and modulation. Whale songs and insect chatter. Not particularly musical in conventional terms but a good show of it's lfo routing and capacity for fx and the abstract, even with no input. Finally a bit of improvised Charles Clouser style horror film type stuff. A monomachine drone and a little key melody underpinned by a cassette in a four track played backwards and slowed down, which leads into a drone / delay overloaded climax. Great modulated delay at the start. Chimaera also has a 3.5mm cv input socket to the filter cutoff if you fancy hooking it up to your cv capable synth or modular. The idea was to make something with a fluid feel that you could go in so many directions with. It never gets old. The more you mess with it the more tricks you pull out of it. Putting even a cheap toy keyboard through it or a rubbish drum machine sounds good. Maybe i'll film those soon. With the uploading of this video a small batch of these are available. I've been on and off of this project for months and it's finally finished. Message me if you want one. If you miss out on this run and still want one let me know because i can quite easily build you one. Find me on facebook. The link is on my youtube home page.

• published: 04 Jan 2015
• views: 16